V.Ra: An In-Situ Visual Authoring System for Robot-IoT Task Planning with Augmented Reality
Cao, Yuanzhi, Zhuangying Xu, Fan Li, Wentao Zhong, Ke Huo, and Karthik Ramani. "V. Ra: An In-Situ Visual Authoring System for Robot-IoT Task Planning with Augmented Reality." In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference, pp. 1059-1070. ACM, 2019. (DIS 2019)
Abstract
We present V.Ra, a visual and spatial programming system for robot-IoT task authoring. In V.Ra, programmable mobile robots serve as binding agents to link the stationary IoTs and perform collaborative tasks. We establish an ecosystem that coherently connects the three key elements of robot task planning, the human, robot, and IoT, with one single mobile AR device. Users can perform task authoring with the Augmented Reality (AR) handheld interface, then placing the AR device onto the mobile robot directly transfers the task plan in a what-you-do-is-what-robot-does (WYDWRD) manner. The mobile device mediates the interactions between the user, robot, and the IoT oriented tasks, and guides the path planning execution with the embedded simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) capability. We demonstrate that V.Ra enables instant, robust and intuitive room-scale navigatory and interactive task authoring through various use cases and preliminary studies.